Pathways to Graduation: Supporting All Students to Mastery

March 27, 2003

Panel Presenters
Mark McQuillan, Office of the Commissioner, Department of Education
Patricia Plummer, Deputy Chancellor, Board of Higher Education

Discussion Respondents
Eduardo Carballo, Superintendent, Holyoke Public Schools
Sandra Kurtinitis, President, Quinsigamond Community College
Wilfredo Laboy, Superintendent, Lawrence Public Schools
Andre Mayer, Senior Vice President for Research, Associated Industries of Massachusetts
Richard Robison, Executive Director, Federation for Children with Special Needs
State Representative Marie St. Fleur (D), Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Education, Arts and Humanities
Student Representative, High School Senior, City on a Hill Charter School

Event Transcript

After airing a nine-minute video featuring Holyoke students discussing their determination to pass the MCAS exam and earn a diploma, education experts meeting at Northeastern University on Thursday discussed the future of thousands of students who have not passed the test.

Experts stressed the importance of retaining the high stakes test, praised the exam for highlighting disparities in student achievement, and suggested ways to help students. They discussed the ethical responsibility to make sure students earn diplomas, whether before or after high school graduation, during this No Child Left Behind era. Others worried that failure to pass the exam may make financial aid unavailable to the students who may need it the most. And still others said better links must quickly be established between those running the K through 12 public education system and the managers of the state's 15 community colleges. At least 2,000 mostly urban high school seniors who have not passed the exam are likely to continue their educations at community colleges, officials said.

The forum began with status briefings offered by Mark McQuillan Deputy Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education and Board of Higher Education Deputy Chancellor Patricia Plummer. The panel discussion that followed included Eduardo Carballo, superintendent, Holyoke Public Schools; Sandra Kurtinitis, president, Quinsigamond Community College; Wilfredo Laboy, superintendent, Lawrence Public Schools; Andre Mayer, senior vice president for research, Associated Industries of Massachusetts; Richard Robison, executive director, Federation for Children with Special Needs; Rep. Marie St. Fleur, co-chair, Joint Committee on Education, the Arts and the Humanities; and Amal Osman, high school senior at City on a Hill Charter School.

The forum was sponsored by the Center for Education Research & Policy at the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. The following is a summary, not a verbatim text, of the presentations and discussion:

NORTHEASTERN SCHOOL OF EDUCATION DEAN JAMES FRASER: We are a quite new school of education. We are focused on high quality education. Having you here is an honor for us and we want to continue a whole lot of connections. I have become by surprise a strong defender of MCAS. We have an ethical responsibility to discuss this. Our critics said you are going to punish the kids and not hold adults accountable. If we do not succeed, our critics will be right. We cannot let this all fall on kids. We have to own this responsibility. At a deep ethical level, this conference is important.

CENTER DIRECTOR PAUL REVILLE: We are devoted to providing quality evidence to feed a civil discourse on education. We are proud to be in our fifth month of operation and associated with MassINC. We are here to talk about something that is an ethical and practical issue and a key part of implementing education reform. We want to talk about how we stick with kids who are unable to graduate. When we passed education reform, we assumed awesome responsibilities and the authority to set standards and measure progress against standards and hold people accountable. The state can withhold diplomas based on a student's mastery. That's an important thing for us to have done.

We need to stick with these students for as long as it takes and help them achieve mastery. How do we do that? It's complex. It involves higher education and community-based organizations and employers, a host of different players and parties and no one system has authority over all of these. We have a complex challenge of bringing together complex pieces to form a net that will catch each child.

We are late in the game right now, almost April with students scheduled to graduate in June. Some students were just notified that they failed for the fourth time. We need to do a more accelerated job in the public policy domain of tying these pieces together. We need to talk about services already in place. Our format is simple. We will ask a couple of representatives at the state level to talk about what the Commonwealth is doing. Then we will move to a discussion with six panelists who will discuss whether what we have is sufficient. Then we will open it up to the audience for comments and questions.

HOLYOKE VIDEO AIRING: [The forum began with the showing of a nine-minute video of interviews with students put together by Holyoke Public Schools Superintendent Eduardo Carballo. In the interviews, students who have not yet passed the MCAS expressed their determination and desire to pass the exam and earn a diploma, the role of remedial programs, and their plans to attend community colleges. Students said they are nervous, but feel like teachers and school administrators are trying to help them pass the MCAS. Students also discussed their jobs and ways that working interferes with education.]

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: That was eloquent testimony. Keep that in mind as we talk about a genuine safety net so students can have the success they deserve and the lives that they want.

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION'S MARK MCQUILLAN: Thank you Dr. Carballo for putting a human face on this problem. Starting with the students is a telling beginning. I can offer a description of where the department is on building a safety net. We have a center for student support services. We dedicate energy to providing a variety of supports, financial and technical assistance across K through 12.

I would like to paint a context of what this conference represents in a historic sense. We are facing a challenge and may be enjoined not to carry out the competency determination. In that context, what happens with students who do not succeed is of very significant importance. The department and many people in this room have taken the position that MCAS is a standard we need. We cannot give up on any student and have to find ways so that the promise of MCAS and education reform is met. This should be an annual event.

This is a turning point for No Child Left Behind, the federal legislation that has a significant amount of money for supplemental services. We can integrate that initiative with the kind of work we see here. I hope we can provide a tighter net of support. At the department we have started an appeals process. It is not a waiver, but an opportunity for a student to demonstrate through grades and an analysis undertaken at the department. We have taken in a number of appeals from students who have not tested right.

We have many, many options for retesting, on an annual cycle, on focused retests. There will be test centers in Boston, Worcester and Springfield in July. Those are basic pieces of work underway. Another feature that will be important for some students - a diploma is what students want - but we do have an opportunity to achieve a certificate of attainment. Students may then participate in graduation ceremonies. The department has set up summer school programs with money allocated through the legislation. We have a $50 million allocation. A good portion is used for summer schools. There are work and learning opportunities through grant funding.

We will be starting initiatives through one-stop career centers that provide counseling about places to get extra help and work and continue their education. That is trying to make the connection to the outside community and the value of on-the-job training. We are working with the community college systems, providing them $350,000 to develop sets of courses and remedial programs to assist students who have not passed the MCAS. We hope to dedicate up to $3 million in '04 to assist those students. We are putting together an array of services, opportunities and means to get kids over the bar.

Is it enough? I think it is not. I think we need to do more. If we don't, simply put, all the work we've been doing for the last ten years will be undercut by our inability to support the students at this last turning point. We cannot give up on any student. We have $35 million going out this year, $12 million dedicated to the high schools and the remainder to K through 8.

We have competitive grants for the class of 2003. We dedicated money for online tutoring. It's been less successful than we had hoped. A variety of monies have been put to reaching out to parents. The fundamental push I am most excited about is a Pathways to Success initiative which channels kids to get additional help. That is a broad set of descriptions. I appeal to you to think about what we can do now to integrate No Child Left Behind where there is money set aside for supplemental services. We need to find a way to tuck this together.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: We have talked about a seamless K through 16 system. We can talk about building a real web. Pat Plummer can talk about that.

BOARD OF HIGHER EDUCATION DEPUTY CHANCELLOR PATRICIA PLUMMER: The timing of this is excellent. Graduation is upon us. There has been extensive and spirited discussion of higher education's role now that we're into ten years of education reform. The promise was that if students worked hard and achieved standards, they would go on to better jobs and a better life. We made a strategic error. Higher education should have been involved in the beginning.
A good job in Massachusetts requires a minimum of an associate's degree. We don't achieve the promise until we provide a higher education. We are facing a $200 million cut in higher education on top of cuts in previous years. A seamless K through 16 system is essential. Other states have done much better than Massachusetts.

This is the third day this week that I have been with my Department of Education colleagues. I assure you we are working together on this but we need to think carefully about students who have passed MCAS and those who have not. That is the way we look at it. How have we gone about this?

In December, we approved Pathways to Success. An advisory committee on educational policy produced this pathway for students. It was a project outlining the next steps. We identified barriers and policy changes needed. A key issue in community college admissions for students without diplomas was their ability to access financial aid. Community colleges are all about access and opportunity. Forty percent of the incoming group is coming out of high school. So we provide services to a whole range of residents.

The first thing that we faced is that students without a diploma don't qualify for financial aid. Fifty percent of students in college need financial aid. The US Department of Agriculture provides an assessment test to make it possible to access financial aid. There was not a real need for it until the class of 2003 appeared on our horizon. We had to deal with the provision of the ability-to benefit test. Community colleges' admissions regulations are determined locally so there is not one set across the 15 community colleges. The test will be offered at all of our community colleges and it will be considered by the federal government the equivalent of a high school diploma for the purpose of accessing financial aid.

Accutest is one of the approved tests. Some of our institutions have already offered it at high schools. There won't be a lot of students who will pass the test. It is very different from the MCAS. Community colleges offer post-secondary education. They are not experts in high school curriculum. We have students who may pass the ability-to-benefit test. It tests college skills and is by no means any easier than the MCAS. What about students who don't pass and can't get financial aid? The department has made available to community colleges funds to develop MCAS transition programs.
A group of community colleges are working together with high school faculty. The first step is an analysis between the MCAS and developmental courses. They are developing modules and later in the spring there will be a meeting of community college folks to disseminate this information. Community college presidents will determine whether they can offer these transition programs. How they are going to be financed is a very important part of this. We know the money put into the department budget for MCAS remediation, we are quite confident it is going to cover the per-student costs.

We know the students are concentrated in our urban areas. We need to know which community colleges are going to provide these programs. There will need to be differences in these programs, but the important thing is the funding that will come per-pupil. That last thing to share, which is good news, is where we have come. Early on, the magnitude of the number of students we thought would need remediation seemed very, very large. We know the news is better. We put a question on the retest about plans post high school. How many students really aspire to higher education? It's about 50 percent of those students. We are looking at that being a number somewhere around 2,000. Some will get appeals. About 1,500 students will show up at our community colleges. That's where we are at this point.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: We have heard about actual programs and possibilities. I will pose some questions. I will start with the superintendents. Talk to us about how does what we've heard meet or fail to meet the needs of students? What are you doing in your district? What is the balance of the state role and the local role?

LAWRENCE PUBLIC SCHOOLS SUPERINTENDENT WILFREDO LABOY: Often when people think about urban superintendents, they get surprised that we are staunch supporters of the MCAS test. What's important about this standard is that for the first time children of color are put on the radar screen. The most important student biographical sketch is the zip code. The notion that no child will be left behind is a good one. Students have been left behind. The idea that for the first time our kids count raises an interesting challenge for us, particularly when you talk about accountability and including English language learners and all kids. How do we get every single child across the finish line?

A wonderful thing the Commonwealth has done is the idea that we have resources to make this happen. We know that if we want to get results we'd better leverage some resources. The department and state should be commended. I served in New York City public schools. They said this is the task and you have no money. At least we have some money. K through 16 is an interesting notion.

What worries me about the ability to benefit is students didn't fare well. It worries me in terms of the rigor and degree of difficulty. The poorest and most needy children will pay the greatest price because they are the children that need the financial aid. One thing we know is the family can't do it, it just doesn't have the means. Tuition at a community college is still a daunting task. Resources are vitally necessary. If we are looking at universal proficiency, we were able to provide universal access over 150 years, so let's not be impatient and give up on students.

This idea that kids are not motivated for the test, well you heard the voices today. I really hope we can partner. We need to find ways of personalizing and putting a face to our efforts. When we say every kid will get it, tell me and show me what that means. What I say is I will not allow you to fail. You will not fail because we will not normalize failure. We feel a sense of urgency and are motivated. We are working but I am not so sure we are tightening the net as well as we should. This is a good start.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: What are you offering to help students and what are the gaps that your see?

HOLYOKE PUBLIC SCHOOLS SUPERINTENDENT EDUARDO CARBALLO: I am very much on the same wavelength as my colleague. Our districts are probably the poorest in the state. I have some problems with students continuing to wait to get into higher education. What's the difference between 218 and 220? Four things have to happen. The supplemental services piece is very disconnected to the work. As I read the places where my students can go from Holyoke, the only place accessible is two sites on the web. In Holyoke there are more TV sets than computers. Tutoring in East Longmeadow is not going to deal with Holyoke students. We have the means and staff and understanding of teaching 10th grade curriculum.

The DOE, if they could speed the approval of major cities as providers, we are very good at what we do. The community colleges are a bus ride away from Holyoke. I meet with Mr. Bartley on a monthly basis. Our students cannot go there without help. We need to provide some dollars. The role of work piece, students want to get diplomas. We need to provide some incentives to allow employers to allow students to continue to work towards diplomas. Most businesses like their employees ready to do work.

The fourth piece is our high schools will have to become year-round facilities and operate at night and on Saturdays. We have students paying rent and with bills. When is he going to get help to pass MCAS? I don't see Holyoke High School being open around the clock because we don't have the dollars to pay for that. At a time of fewer resources, how are we going to meet the challenge? It's going to be an interesting thing. Look at 365 school districts. We have two Hispanic superintendents. The progress has been slow. We are going to need a lot of help.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: What are the challenges facing you at community colleges and what tools do you need?

QUINSIGAMOND COMMUNITY COLLEGE PRESIDENT SANDRA KURTINITIS: I have to say the video was so much reflective of the kinds of students that Quinsigamond and any community college deals with. Until 2003, those are students who would work with us through our well-developed programs and help them be successful if success was in the cards for them. Think about No Child Left Behind. Our mantra has been No Person Left Behind.

The MCAS challenge is one we will roll into our set of challenges. Those faces are our faces. Working to resolve those challenges is our commitment. The superintendents have spoken to their ability and dedication. Pat Plummer summarized very well the issues we have struggled with. There was a facile assumption early on that the community colleges will pick up the challenge. We were talking about large numbers early on. We were worried because we are not MCAS curriculum experts. That is not our focus or mission. The open door is our mission. When the conversation sharpened, we expressed our concern that you cannot just dump 3,000 students into a system and hold them to standards.

Now that 2003 has come, our college has been engaged with Worcester public schools and we have only been helping out. As this population graduates, we are ready to step forward and develop in partnership with our colleagues in K through 12 the same type of MCAS preparation that we developed years ago for GED. That's a very different kind of test than MCAS. But I say the work DOE is doing to create mechanisms and put money behind them is similar to the GED. Putting money on the table is probably the most important thing that the Commonwealth needs to do. If you put so much money into education over ten years and students are still failing, we can not just walk away. You can't expect the community college system that has not received the funding to just know how to do it.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: So we have done remedial work, but the challenge is to align the work with the benchmarks of MCAS?

QUINSIGAMOND'S KURTINITIS: That's a good summary. We would be happy to take students into our developmental programs. We would strengthen them and get them ready to pass the ability-to-benefit test.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: Andre Mayer from Associated Industries, we hear about an important role for employers to play. Do you think the expectations from the employer community are reasonable?

ASSOCIATED INDUSTRIES OF MASSACHUSETTS SENIOR VP ANDRE MAYER: The employer community has been an advocate for this effort and is impressed by how much has been accomplished. There is an increasing level of frustration about the kind of contribution that we can make going forward. To some extent, it's the opposite side of the coin that Dr. Carballo talked about. Though many of the students in question are in our workforce, the thing employers really can't do is targeting. We don't have the data. The schools have the data.
There's even an ethical issue. Are we doing things for some employees and not others, there are problems involved in rewarding the higher achievers. There was a lot of talk in the Swift administration about a volunteer program. It never went anywhere. There were not the resources to bridge that gap. You are dealing with a narrow slice of the population at risk. Employers are aware of the ethical issues that Jim talked about at the beginning, and uncertain about how they can work with the existing institutions to really help the young people who need help.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: Rich Robison, you are a parent and advocate for special education students. How does what you have heard meet or fail to meet their needs? What are the gaps?

FEDERATION FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS DIRECTOR RICHARD ROBISON: I am a parent of two young adults with significant cognitive disabilities. I fear that when I start to talk about students that we are familiar with, that the eyelids are almost still coming down. We are serious about the fact that these kids need a high quality education. The unemployment rate for students with these types of disabilities still runs around 70 percent, which is an atrocity. That said, the position we have taken is we welcome the standards and the opportunity to include our kids. It's the first time they've really been on the screen. We value those whom we measure.

We see significant progress occurring. We also value high expectations i.e. access to the curriculum. Most of the kids in special education have never had curriculum until the last two or three years. My appreciation goes to the effort to create pathways. My suggestion would be to think about post-secondary options for kids with special needs. A mechanism in place is the IEP, which requires transition plans for any student 14 or above. The federal government has cited Massachusetts for being out of compliance with the federal law.

I have my own personal connection to it. My daughter with Down's Syndrome is taking courses at a community college. Since she has been taking those courses, her reading and writing and math are continuing to improve and she is learning about disability issues. She sat me down to tell me about the requirements of an IEP and that she was the only kid in her class to have early intervention services, something she is very proud of. We really see this population as just beginning to emerge.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: We started this with hearing from students. Amal, you are a successful student. You have passed this test and worked with students who have not. What do those students need most?

CITY ON A HILL CHARTER SCHOOL HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR AMAL OSMAN: I worked at the youth program at English High School. It helps Somali students. They are being asked to pass MCAS that I barely passed. They just learned English and could barely add or subtract. I didn't see professional tutors and I didn't have a set curriculum. I was just helping them read. At City on the Hill, we have an MCAS Academy that you enter in 9th grade. We have action items from the beginning and two years of practice. Students said they didn't have the confidence. Doing the problems every day instilled the confidence in me. With all of the help I received, it was easy for me to pass. I agree with the ability-to-benefit test as another option. As for ESL students, there is a lot of work that needs to be done.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: As for policy, we have Education Committee Co-chair Rep. Marie St. Fleur here. As you listen to comments, do you think we have the wherewithal to do what we need to do, let alone the resources? Do we need new policies that link more deliberately higher ed with K through 12.

EDUCATION COMMITTEE CO-CHAIR REP. MARIE ST. FLEUR: We have the policies; we need to implement them. We are always sort of two steps behind. The seamless K though 16 system is being introduced as new. I have read about where we had been. I read reports from the 70s that talked about seamless systems. I read the Saxon report. In the legislation, a requirement is this whole idea of interacting through the system. Somehow or other, even though the regulations and the law is there, we have not implemented it. You need to look at who is responsible. The Department of Education and the board and the governor have the responsibility.

I am not satisfied that we have championed the issue and we need to figure out why the people that need to do it are not making it happen. That is the most delicate way I can put it. I don't think our system is broken. But our system needs some help. There are things that may need to be thrown out, but after some thoughtful analysis. Should we be able to move forward even though we are crippled, we should be able to. We have competing interests. I sit in another room with those concerned about housing. In another room it's health care. I have a bias towards education. If we did what we were supposed to do for 30 years, a lot of people would have been able to access health care and housing.

EDUCATION COMMITTEE CO-CHAIR REP. MARIE ST. FLEUR: How do we prevent the next generation from being in the same scenario? Resources are one issue. We should not kill the reform that we started. I need your voices about what we should maintain. Communicate that to my colleagues. We have a bare bones system we are maintaining. How do we absorb some of the cuts that we are going to have to absorb and maintain that system? That is what we are struggling with up on the Hill right now. The people on this panel have the concerns I have. For minority students, we finally count. If we pull away, it puts it into the closet. Our kids have been taking tests forever but no test is causing the furor that this one is. We now focus on what students have actually learned. They are being taught to think. That is something you can take anywhere. Our kids deserve that. I will call on you to talk about that to my colleagues. The commitment in this room speaks to the fact that we can hold the line on this.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: We appreciate your powerful voice in this struggle for equity. The focus here is on providing a safety net. I ask you to make brief comments or questions and direct your questions please.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I am from the Boston Private Industry Council. We are working with our classroom-in-the-workplace program to have students gain employment and remediation. We are also engaging the community. Many students are disassociated from the schools. So we are working on outreach. We are trying to build more options. My question relates to special education. Should extra consideration be in place for this class?

LAWRENCE SCHOOLS SUPERINTENDENT LABOY: We are working hard but have done poorly. It's an interesting idea that the people with the highest stake here are children. Often when we interview kids as they leave, they will say I just didn't know the content for the question. The challenge for MCAS is equally daunting to get the adults in the mix to say ultimately we are collectively responsible for this task. For too long we say to the kid, you didn't get it and the kid walks away with the head down. We need to say to the adult, what did you do?

FEDERATION FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS DIRECTOR ROBISON: I don't think a delay in the requirement is going to change the problem. These students have always been there. They have ended up unemployed. Maybe they are not ready to receive the diploma but they will have three or four years of quality education to help them get there. Getting to the goal in 12 years may not be realistic. But they can get to the goal.

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION'S MARK MCQUILLAN: I concur. Some students just need more time. To change that standard would be a disservice.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I am from a one-stop career center in Holyoke. Our work does not stop at 5 pm. I am trying to engage the business community. AIM is an organization I contacted. I haven't had a response and it's been several months. Our responsibility is to create caring environments. We need to do community building and we need business to find one reason why you are going to get involved. If you have an issue with discrimination, work it out. The prevention dollar is much cheaper than the corrective action. This is an investment for you. If we don't start at the beginning, your labor pool is going to be much smaller and you are going to be out of business.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: I know business was at the origin of education reform.

ASSOCIATED INDUSTRIES' ANDRE MAYER: None of us would say the participation has been satisfactory to any of us. It has been more difficult than we had hoped it would be. At this point, when we're really focusing on a group of students, you really see the necessity of having the educational system attuned to dealing with that problem. That's where we really have to be working with them and through them.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I am from a small corporation and the brother of a special needs student. We are learning from efforts of affluent families with special needs children. We need to look for very specific openings. Students have entitlements that extend beyond when they are 18. Attorneys need to fight for them. In the AIDS community now, there is a gathering where requirements are discussed in such detail that they are addressed. In education, we have a lousy tradition of research connected to practice. We have districts where every special needs student has passed. We have found ways to get special needs students to meet this challenge. That's what we need to research.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I am a former employee of Jobs For Youth, which funds literacy programs through the Department of Education. Many community-based organizations provide MCAS preparation and they do GED. We set up and support MCAS prep programs. We use software as the core of our MCAS prep. In several large high schools, we have found students in our program passed the December retest at rates ranging from 10 to 30 percent higher than the other kids. There is a methodology that allows intense focus in a way that is congenial to the students.

AUDIENCE STATEMENT: I am about to be the skunk at the garden party. I think there is an integrity piece here. We have heard about what everyone wants to do. Are you willing to come back next year and talk about what worked and didn't work? I don't want to imply for one minute that DOE is responsible for this. I want to know that we can say what actually worked. I would love some support. I have the kids that are well below 216, 218. I was a nurse and ran an emergency room. I didn't want aides who could not read labels. We need to look to you as superintendents and businesses and say can we meet here a year from now?

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: We are committed to this issue. We are here to put this issue on the map.

AUDIENCE STATEMENT: I am working at Career Point. I applaud superintendent Carballo. I have moved with students. If schools have not seen parents get involved, you are going to see them now. Parents are calling and meeting with me. I worked for 14 years in a youth program and did a lot of community building. I know the root causes in my community. My daughter just passed the MCAS. We need more collaboration. Youth are becoming confused. There are so many services that they don't know which one is what.

CENTER DIRECTOR REVILLE: Keep the voices of students in mind. This is a critical issue. We will reconvene to discuss our progress at some future date.